Starbook

by Ben Okri

  'One person's sickness without a song makes the whole tribe sick.'

  'One person's illness that doesn't give meaning makes the whole tribe ill.'

  'One person's madness without a making makes the whole tribe mad.'

  'Soon she will infect our dreams.'

  'Soon she will make us sick just looking at her,'

  'Her failure to heal herself will be catching.'

  'The children will get new diseases because of her shadow.'

  'The young girls will become infertile because of her bad example.'

  'And the daughter of one of our most powerful masters will become an abomination and a curse unto us.'

  'The problems of powerful people destroy the land.'

  'We must destroy them first before they destroy us.'

  'If they don't clear up their own troubles.'

  'And give us an art that makes the air good again to breathe.'

  'The air is not good now.'

  'Because of that maiden.'

  'She should create something, before we all die.'

  'Or we will have to kill her.'

  'Or have her banished from the tribe.'

  'Sent into the hills.'

  'To join the mad.'

  'And all those who are infertile in art.'

  'Unable to heal themselves.'

  'And heal the tribe.'

  'The tribe will not perish because one person is unable to dream.'

  'Better if she is not seen.'

  'Better if she becomes invisible.'

  'And no longer reminds us of what we fear.'

  'And what is coming near.'

  'The end of our days.'

  'And our dreaming ways.'

  'Our art and our song.'

  'That have lasted long.'

  'Our dreams, our freedom.'

  'Better than any kingdom.'

  'Our vision.'

  'Our mission.'

  'We will protect them all.'

  'That sick maiden will not create our fall.'

  And so the two strangers will part. And they would spread their unease through the tribe, as others were doing. And slowly this unease, this gathering expectation worked on her too, and made her malaise worse.

  CHAPTER TWENTY–TWO

  And so some time before the maiden's life was changed by the encounter at the river, after she had recovered a little from the sleeplessness brought on by her glimpse of the great tragic sculpture, the maiden again found herself overcome with a strange agonised boredom, a peculiar malaise, and a giddy longing in her body.

  It was as if about this time some significant event should be happening to her, but wasn't. Her body was full of a ripe rich expectation of an experience beyond her comprehension. Her heart would burst into bizarre palpitations, as if any moment someone she longed for all her life would suddenly appear and take her away to a land of dream.

  She became jumpy. She peered into every stranger's face, hoping to recognise someone whom she had never seen, or someone seen too long ago. She waited for a voice, a touch that would wake her into the true enchanted dream of her life.

  She fell into a condition akin to stupidity, wandering about in a state of shining and pitiful innocence, a wide-eyed waiting.

  In an odd way the same thing was happening to the tribe. It existed in a state of wide-eyed waiting, expecting something momentous to happen without warning. An ennui and restlessness descended on the tribe, like a fatal ailment; a resignation, a boredom, a sense of fatality crept over everything. This was apparent in the listless way that the artisans worked at their masks and carvings, the drowsy manner in which the women wended their ways to the river, the slow atmosphere that hung over the children at play, and the dense breezes bringing heat, forgetfulness, and a sleepwalking quality by day. The tribe also seemed mysteriously to empty out, to become hollowed, and diminished. The sculptures and masks and carvings, the masquerades awaiting their motion and their accoutrement and their spirit possession, hung about the village square empty of power, and drained of significance. Some mysterious thing seemed to be devouring the spirit of the tribe. Some mysterious thing seemed to be devouring the heart and soul of the entire land, for the tribe was the secret heart of the land.

  CHAPTER TWENTY–THREE

  This new deadly air was never more visible than at the secret council meetings of the hidden masters of the tribe. They met infrequently, but at regular intervals. They convened always in the dead of night. They came without candles or any illumination, and they always wore masks so as not to be recognised by other members, either through their voices or by their faces. Only certain signs and passwords, certain vowel sounds, certain handshakes at the gate of enigmas permitted them entry into the long room of power.

  They were chosen anonymously, because of indirect wisdom shown, authority and personal spiritual power made evident in their art; or in a deed accomplished that bordered on the miraculous and which could be repeated, with acceptable variation, as a sign of mastery. Only those who could command spirits, who could make a flower manifest out of empty air, who could enter the dreams of multitudes, who could foresee the future, who had attained a degree of illumination in the great secret mysteries of the tribe, who had battled with evil, who were masters of their art, and who had attained to a sublime impersonality, an inspired indifference and a cosmic sense of humour, only such as these were accepted, initiated, and admitted as hidden masters of the tribe. Their powers were many and unstated, fluid and invented, in line with the artistic and spiritual needs of the tribe and of the times. It was they who had to go into the seeds of things and read what the future was bringing, or to interpret what the present was saying, or to listen at the oracles of the people's art. It was they who had to attune to the gods, to the ancestors, and to the great heavens, to learn, to avert disasters, to combat evil in the place where it is born, and to replenish the dreams and the breathing of the people. If the quality of masters fell, the tribe was in peril. It had happened before, when an era of low-calibre and brash individuals dominated the council and nearly destroyed the foundations of the tribe. An important lesson was learnt: a people are only as great or as strong as the quality of the secret masters who guide them on their journey through time to their destiny. And this was never so clear as when a people were confronted with a crisis. But there are different sorts of crises: there are visible ones and there are invisible ones. Of the two the invisible crises are the hardest to deal with, and they present the greatest threat to the survival of the people.

  It is from invisible dangers that a people most perish. A danger without a name, or a form; a danger that cannot be seen; a danger without a face; a danger that enters a land and destroys it before anyone knows it is there. Then afterwards only a few standing stones, broken shards in the sands and mysterious skulls rolling in the wind give any sign that a vigorous tribe once lived in fertility and joy in a place grown over with trees or made barren by encroaching dust.

  To see invisible dangers before they bring destruction is one of the greatest gifts the wise can have. To have their warnings heeded is the good fortune of a people. To believe how that which cannot be seen can bring about the end is the blessing of the heart. Civilisations have not been so fortunate; history is written with their bones and their disappearance.

  It was with such a danger, one that didn't seem a danger but a mere malaise, that the tribe and the land as a whole were now confronted, and didn't know it. But the secret masters gathering in anonymity from their diverse places sensed something they didn't know they were sensing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY–FOUR

  They arrived like ghosts at an appointed hour of the dark. Masters are known by their deeds. They all arrived in silence, without a murmur. Even the old didn't rustle the dark. Degeneracy would come soon and devastate the core of the land, but before then the old clarity and vigour still reigned. Before the age of dust, masters were masters still. Just before the fall, some last splendour survived even in that atmosph
ere of the last days when the dark and the fireflies fell under the spell of a doom that had crept into the secret heart of the land.

  At the last meeting they had sat, these masters, in complete silence, with nothing to say about anything. They drank their harsh alcohol in silence, and chewed their kola nuts and their kaoline as if in a trance. The rituals at the beginning of the proceedings had been listless and seemed irrelevant for the first time in years. Nothing to say. Nothing seen. Nothing thought. Just silence like a poison drunk in the dark. Then at the earliest signs of dawn they all rose and dissipated like shadows back to their homes.

  The last time poisoned the next. They had the new habit as malaise. Now, they sat in silence. Old age, wisdom, the vigour of the mature years, time lived in prophecies, skins soaked and cracked in legends, eyes drained by enchantments, hearts that have dwelt in evil as much as in great good, minds that have known what wickedness is, mouths that have lied politically about oracles and distorted the messages of the gods, bones that have worked to the good of the tribe even as they have bent and twisted with prevailing winds, now all these faculties, blended into one spirit of the council at the tribe's heart, were silent, dumb, unable to function. Some sickness had befallen the oracle itself. The well of divinations was poisoned. Slowly, not knowing how, the gods were abandoning a people. Some master twist of fortune was in play.

  History, brought down from the heights where the scale of evils past outweighs the good that had been done, history was delivering some strange verdict on the land – a parable, a symbol, a message to future ages, different in meaning when lived through than when examined in the perspective of time. And it was among the council that the enigma of history was first manifest, and no one could read the signs, or interpret the parable that they were living through. Does the feather feel the death of the sun?

  Silence, and nothing to say. The masters sat, staring at one another's dark space in the dark. Thinking about nothing. Vacancy in their midst. The desert had arrived in the midst of the forest. Scattered remains of bronze busts emerging from the earth will tell a tale no one can hear. It started here. In the dark.

  Then suddenly, as if an invisible point of light had penetrated the mud walls and illuminated an essential spot, an unknown voice among the masters began to speak. The voice recounted a dream they had been having persistently, which they persistently forgot. At last, now, it was remembered.

  CHAPTER TWENTY–FIVE

  It was a dream about a golden heron lost in its own dream. Beautiful white birds descended on the heron and tore off all its feathers and broke its wings and left it dying on the riverbank where it lay sick for ninety-nine years, sick and dying, but not dead. The birds had also fallen on the nest of the heron and carried off many of its children and many died on the seas and many others were borne off and scattered about the world in horrible conditions, and they did not know one another any more, and forgot that they were all children of the golden heron.

  In the dream the children suffered and grew and changed and married in these different lands, while the mother heron lay sick and dying by the river and on the dry sands. The children of the heron that were not carried away were not the same any more, they became sick too, and spent most of their time fighting one another, and dying.

  And then one day the birds in the world woke up to the realisation that they were all descended from the same bird in heaven and were all related to the dying heron and they realised that if the heron was dying, they were dying too.

  The voice telling of the dream fell silent at this point and did not speak again for the rest of the council meeting. The other masters had listened with an air both listless and interested. And they listened to the silence too. And they had nothing to say, no interpretations to offer. They were just content with the mood of malaise that had so infected all aspects of the life of that dream-enclosed tribe. And when dawn hinted from the edges of the sky, the council members returned in silence to their masked lives.

  CHAPTER TWENTY–SIX

  The maiden continued to suffer in her wide-eyed waiting. Her body troubled her. It seemed such a strange and alien and heavy thing to be bearing about all the time. She felt oddly that she shouldn't really have a body, that it somehow restricted her, and prevented her flight and freedom. The maiden was profoundly sick with a deep sickness of the heart and head, but she was radiant and healthy. She felt she was dying, but was vibrantly alive. She was deeply unwell, but seemed youthful and blooming. She felt awkward, and yet was acquiring sublime grace. She felt her body heavy, and yet she ran and skipped about like a young gazelle on the plains. She was weighed down with a deep unhappiness, and yet she was giddy with delight, her head spinning in vertigo and sudden fevers of joy. She felt like dying, and yet she loved life like a bird in spring, by the river.

  The maiden walked about in a dream. She heard nothing that anyone said. She performed her errands wrongly, and uttered silly and irrelevant things. She would suddenly burst out laughing for no reason except an arising bubble of happiness in the pit of her belly, or near her heart. Or she would suddenly burst into tears while listening to the tribal drums near the shrine, or staring at the clouds, or walking in the forest, or playing a skipping game on the sands near their house. And she would, for no reason, throw her arms round her mother's neck and kiss her all over. Or she would suddenly begin a carving of a face in ebony and would stop just when its beauty was beginning to emerge ...

  CHAPTER TWENTY–SEVEN

  Much the same thing, but in a different key, was happening with the masters in their nocturnal meetings of great import.

  They felt many intuitions, but had no clear understanding. Impulses haunted them, but their tongues were inexpressive. An oppressive gloom weighed on them, and yet they felt light in their silence. Spirits of warning flitted about them, but interpretation eluded their minds. Oracles made diverse signs to them, but they were deaf. Tremors happened amongst them, yet they felt only the movement of the wind on the raffia rooftops in the dark.

  Silence was their main speech. They sat and stared and brooded on vacant moods. Dreams passed by them unnoticed. And in the silence they heard worlds coming to an end in the hollow cry of birds in the sleeping forests.

  But a few days after the last meeting the unknown voice continued with the dream that they had; or, rather, they dreamt more of the dream that they had recounted, as of a tale unfinished. The voice said:

  '... and the white birds realised the horror of what their ancestors had done. And they couldn't sleep well any more for the agony of it. And they wanted to change a terrible thing that had come to pass. Meanwhile the children of the dying heron learnt also of their dying ancestor and all the scattered tribes of them from all over the world set off on a great journey back to their original home. They brought the lost rains with them. Rains that had gone away for centuries they brought back with them. They returned on yellow rafts and golden canoes. And they converged at the riverbank. It was a great day in the history of the golden herons. And the mother heron, touched by the love and blessings brought back by her descendants from all over the world, and revived by the wonderful gestures of repentance made by the descendants of the white birds, and awoken by the knowledge of the great kinship all birds had with the mighty father bird in heaven, moved by all this, the mother heron that was sick and dying on the dry bank of the river began to make a miraculous recovery, and experienced an amazing regeneration. Then she became at last what she could never have been without these tragic events – a beautiful golden bird among birds, enriching heaven and earth with her surprising splendour. She became a gift of the sun. And because of her regeneration the kingdom of birds was raised higher in the wonderful scheme of things. And a new cycle of history began on earth, leading to the fulfilment of the true and mysterious prophecies of the race of birds.'

  The masters of the tribe listened in silence to the recounting of this elaborate dream. And when its telling was finished, further silence reigned. And nothin
g more was said.

  But the sense of waiting and apprehension continued, as if they sensed the mood of the end of time.